Free The Owl Hunt by Richard S. Wheeler Page B

ponies groomed. It looked like a parade, just what the Yankee army did when a visiting general arrived to inspect them. Within half a morning, Owl knew all about this new thing. There were a handful of soldiers remaining at the post. The agency settlement was undefended but for those. The column slowly heading upriver was intended for show, not war. The white men’s message to the Dreamers was plain: stop it. Go back to your quiet ways.
    Now his lieutenants crowded around Owl, waiting for word. The young man slid easily into the authority granted to him. “Let them march. Let our camps vanish before the blue column. Let them seek the People and find no one except the older ones. Let them go where they will and return to their fort puzzled. Let those remaining at the agency, the mission, the school, learn that they are not safe. But do not harm them, not until the vision comes. Let them know that Owl has spoken.” He eyed his lieutenants. “And if the People go hunting away from the reservation, there will be no blue-bellies to stop them.”
    The lieutenants liked that. They liked taking direction from this stripling boy who could peer into the spirit world. They liked his authority. So Owl’s word was carried to every corner of the reservation except where the Arapahos were settling, and soon all the People knew what to do. They kept an eye on the blue column, led by Captain Cinnabar, and well before the column arrived in some camp, the lodges were dismantled and spirited away, and the place vanished. And some among them were well beyond the reservation, hunting game on white men’s ranches.
    Wherever the column rode, the soldiers were observed by many eyes watching from the surrounding hills. Plainly the captain was puzzled, and sometimes sent patrols out to follow the lodge trails, the furrows of the dragged lodgepoles, and sometimes they found a lodge filled with elders living peacefully beside a creek. But when the villages dispersed, they took their lodges in all directions, so there were dozens of trails, and Captain Cinnabar had little understanding. If his was a show of force, it was proving futile because there was no one who saw it.
    Mare and Walks at Night were reporting each day’s events.
    â€œWe drummed near the mission, not the Dreamer songs, but the drumming from old times, and soon the mission man and woman were frightened,” said Mare. “Skye’s boy appeared, and we slipped into the night. Later we put an owl arrow near him, always heeding Owl’s word not to kill, not now. But how I itched to plant that arrow in his chest. He was born of a Shoshone woman, and now he spends his days destroying the old ways. How I itched!”
    â€œWhat did he do?”
    â€œHe rolled into the moon shadow of the porch, frightened, but then he sprang at me, and I reached the shadows just in time.”
    â€œHe had no courage and sought the shadow,” Owl said. “His time is coming. He is a mixed-blood, born of the People only to betray the People.”
    Of all those whom Owl despised, Dirk Skye was chief among them. Dirk Skye had Shoshone blood but taught white men’s wisdom.
    â€œLet him think about the owl arrow,” Walks at Night said.
    â€œWhen the moon comes up, put an owl arrow close to Buffalo Horn,” Owl said. “Let him see the power of the Dreamers.”
    â€œYour father, Owl?” asked Walks at Night.
    â€œHe does not see with true eyes and does not honor the vision of his own son,” Owl said.
    â€œBut your father?”
    Owl stared at the older man until the man seemed to wilt into his moccasins.
    Someday all the People would rejoice in what Owl had done. The People would be free, and the land would be scourged of evil, and the Dreamers would be honored at all the lodge fires of all the old men. And Owl would be remembered even as Sweet Medicine was remembered among the Cheyenne, the lawgiver and the savior of the